Number the Clouds
by Tripleguess
Summary: A cloud. Just a cloud. That was all it was. Companion to King of Dreams.


**Number the Clouds**  
_a Munto fanfiction by Tripleguess  
Genre: Fantasy/Drama  
Rated PG+  
April 1-June 28, 2009  
Summary: A cloud. Just a cloud. That was all it was. Companion to **King of Dreams**._

There it was again.

She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and looked at the grass instead. The blades were sharp and vibrant, each casting its own tiny shadow to lace with the shadows of all the grass around. Her own shadow flickered with the sun, blotted out by a swift patch of cirrus scudding over.

But she couldn't help it. She had to check.

She looked up.

A cloud. Just a cloud. That was all it was.

She swung her schoolbag savagely at a shrub that had escaped other trimming and was crowding into the sidewalk.

Only a cloud. Even so, it was more than she wanted to see.

X X X

It wasn't fair.

That was the phrase that pillowed her mind at night; that pricked it to aching wakefulness in the morning.

Everyone else had something. Everyone else had moved on.

Except for her.

"Is something wrong with me?" she asked the clock.

The clock ticked on, then chimed 2am. She groaned and turned over, pulling the blankets with her.

Everyone else had found or been found. Only she had been left behind.

X X X

Suzume was no help. She greeted each day with open arms, as though the fact that the sun had risen once more was reason enough to be alive.

"Don't you miss her?" Ichiko demanded once, when the cheerfulness drove her to the snapping point.

"Of course I do," was the prompt reply. "But I'm happy for her. Be happy for her, Ichiko."

Easy for her to say. "You have Kazuya. Of course you're happy."

"She was happy for me when she had no one," Suzume reminded her.

Ichiko kicked a rock. It bounced yards down the street, ricocheted off the gutter and disappeared down a sewer grate. "I'm not Yumemi."

X X X

Nor was Takashi. He alternately hovered and cowered, depending on her mood. Sometimes she let him try to help. More often she drove him off with a few sharp words. He always forgave her and came back when she needed him. She felt terrible afterwards, but she couldn't seem to make herself stop. Couldn't even find the will to try.

Everyone else was growing up. Only she was stopped in time.

X X X

_Gone._

The ball banged into the backboard, but ducked obediently through the hoop after one swirl.

_Gone._

They were both leaving her, in one way or another. The truth was, she wasn't ready to let them go.

She dove for the ball and caught it deftly, then shot it over her shoulder. Despite the awkward angle, it sailed through the hoop again.

After her mother died, they'd seemed like the last threads of normalcy in her life. Her dad tried, but without Mom it just wasn't the same. In a way, she'd lost him too. They struggled to talk to each other, or didn't.

"Hey, sweaty girl!"

She ignored the jibe, sinking another basket. Sports had been the one thing she was good at. On the court, she could forget. All the fear of change could be crowded out by skinned knees and pulled muscles, aching shoulders and the thrill of a score. Being called sweaty girl -- and worse -- was a small price to pay.

She surged at the fence, dribbling, and smirked as the students on the other side flinched. Whatever they said to her back, they knew better than to mess with her. Or her friends.

Protecting them had become her life. Maybe she couldn't stop her own pain, but she could stop theirs...

That was what she had thought. Had thought for years. Hope died hard.

In the end, after everything, Yumemi had treated her like an obstacle. In the end, when it came to a choice, she'd gone with _him_. In the end, only a stranger had been able to heal Yumemi's pain.

"Auuuuuuuuuughhhhhh!"

Ichiko hurled the ball at nowhere, tears blurring the courtyard. Her lungs ached. Every day, it was the same conversation with herself. It always ended the same way.

She was running out of basketballs.

She clung to the chain link, letting it press into her skin as she gasped for breath. Traffic droned by, unheeding. It didn't matter whether or not she was having a breakdown.

Maybe she hadn't been completely right. Maybe Yumemi had known herself best after all.

That didn't make the hurt go away.

"You dropped this."

She blinked. A man was holding out her basketball.

She thought she'd thrown it farther than that.

"Here." He flipped it over the fence. She caught it without thought.

"Thanks," she said automatically.

He studied her face. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," she snapped, and dribbled in a circle, if only to make a point of ignoring him.

"If you say so," he said after a minute, and walked away.

Something -- in the turn of his shoulder, in the sun on his face -- jarred against a deep, primal nerve. She launched into the high jump that had made her the terror of the volleyball team and hurled the ball at his head.

He caught it without turning around. Then, as though to add insult to injury, he bounced it experimentally.

He turned and smiled affably. "You dropped this."

He lofted it over the fence again. She had to run to catch it this time. When she turned around, he was gone.

X X X

The next time she saw him, he walking slowly across a busy intersection. Horns blared and people jostled him as they hurried by; he seemed not to notice. He was concentrating on a creased paper in his hands that looked like a cafe menu.

It didn't take long for the crowd of real-speed pedestrians to leave him behind. The lights changed. She open her mouth to yell that a bus was bearing down on him, but with a graceful flick of his ankle he was on the sidewalk -- still whole, still oblivious.

She blinked. Someone bumped her from behind; in her surprise, she hadn't realized that she'd stopped walking. She murmured an apology and looked around to get her bearings.

"You again."

He was standing in front of her.

She blinked again. Either her mind was dropping frames, or he was faster than a gazelle. He'd barely been within shouting distance a heartbeat ago. "What?"

"Are you hungry?"

He tilted his head at the paper. It _was_ a menu.

She was hungry. She'd come here to buy lunch. But he rubbed her the wrong way. "No."

"Then... can you recommend a place to eat?"

Silently, she pointed.

"Thank you." He smiled and walked into the restaurant _opposite_ to the one she'd indicated.

She gaped until more pedestrians almost knocked her over, then darted after him.

"Hey, this isn't where I meant," she called as she pushed through the swing doors. It was a light, airy place, but still darker than outside. She squinted and finally spotted him at the counter, talking to a waitress.

She steamrolled the conversation. "I pointed over there. Not over here."

He looked amused. "I know."

"You... you..." She pointed an accusing finger at him. He was guilty; of what, she wasn't sure.

"He warned me about you."

She stopped searching for insults. "What?"

"He said not to eat anything you suggested."

She sputtered. He laughed, accepted a number plaque from the waitress, and went to a table.

Ichiko stomped after him. "You're very rude," she started to say, but a loud growl from her stomach interrupted her.

He chuckled. "Why don't you join me?"

"I..."

The waitress arrived with a heaping bowl of fruit salad. He asked her for another plate. Ichiko sat down without meaning to. The food looked _very_ good.

"Who are you?"

"I'm visiting on business."

The waitress returned and handed a plate and a set of chopsticks to Ichiko, who snapped them apart automatically. "That's not what I asked."

He shrugged and dug into his food. "Does it matter?"

She poked suspiciously at the salad, but there was obviously nothing wrong with it. "Why can't you just answer the question?"

"I'm eating," he said with an air of long-suffering. "You should do the same."

Try as she might, that was all she could get out of him.

X X X

She ran into him again at Kazuya's home, of all places. An errand had brought her to the area and she'd decided to drop by in case Suzume -- who wasn't answering her phone -- happened to be there.

Suzume was there, all right. She was standing on the porch holding Kazuya's hand. And Kazuya was talking to _him_.

She couldn't quite hear what they were saying, but the conversation was too friendly to be one between strangers. Kazuya's expression was about as warm as it ever got, not the icy look that scared solicitors away. As she watched, the nameless man handed him a sealed roll of paper.

Kazuya looked surprised and pleased. "I don't think anyone's ever written me a letter before."

Ichiko, crossing the yard now, got a better look as Kazuya inspected the seal. Not paper; parchment, with a crimson wax seal.

"If you'd care to write one back, I'll take it with me when I go."

"I'll do that." Kazuya touched the roll to an imaginary hat in salute. "Come back tonight and I'll have it ready."

The man smiled. "He'll be delighted. Not that he'll admit as much..."

Kazuya smirked. "Figures."

"Wait, don't go yet!" Suzume ran after him and pulled at his sleeve. "Will you take a letter to Yumemi too?"

He ruffled her hair. Suzume was the same age as Ichiko, but her childlike demeanor made it hard to treat her like an adult. "Of course."

Ichiko caught her breath. "How do you know Yumemi?"

He turned. "I think you're dogging me."

"I just came here to find Suzume."

"She's here." He pointed, as though she might have missed the bouncing teenager, then lifted a hand to Kazuya and walked away.

Ichiko ran after him. "How do you know Yumemi?"

"You _are_ dogging me."

"Answer the question!"

He smiled oddly; Ichiko wondered sardonically if he had any other kind of expression. "You really want to know?"

"Yes, dang it!"

He pointed upward. "What's that?"

She blinked. He was pointing... he was pointing... to...

The sky seemed to shift and glow; his hair shimmered, turquoise seeping into nondescript brown. Above, a triangular silhouette shouldered in among softer shapes, as startling as fresh-spilt blood. She felt her throat constrict. "It's..."

She caught herself. "It's a cloud." She laughed, though it sounded hollow. "What else?"

The sky was flat. The clouds were clouds. His hair was brown.

"Is that so," he said softly. He looked disappointed.

She shook herself; he was walking away again. "Wait! How do you know Yumemi?"

"Yumemi?" He didn't look back, nor did he stop. "Who's Yumemi?"

X X X

She lost him after that. Strange, though he didn't hurry; strange, though she ran; she could never catch him.

He disappeared for a week, or maybe she had only imagined him. She went back to practicing basketball. The old circle of loss tried to start up again, but no sooner did it get whirling than it crashed into a reef of brown and turquoise and spent itself, exhausted.

"Who the hell does he think he is?" she muttered. "'Who's Yumemi,' indeed. _Jerk!_"

She hurled the ball in time with the epithet. And missed. It banged into the backboard at an angle and went careening over the fence. She trudged after it wearily, staring at the ground as the backboard vibrated mockingly.

A scrape, a bounce. The ball rolled across her sneakers.

She looked up. He was walking away.

"Hey." She picked up the ball. "Hey!"

He ignored her. She gritted her teeth and ran to the fence. "I said stop!"

He didn't. And he was about to turn the corner, pass out of sight.

"Come on, mister!" She dropped the ball and swarmed the fence, wincing as the wires bit into her skin. She'd count the bruises later. She winced again as she hit the ground, the bottom of her feet stinging with the impact, then shook it off and ran. "You never tell me anything!"

"It's no use teaching people who don't want to know."

She stopped dead. "You --"

_don't want to_

"...jerk," she muttered, wishing she had the ball so she could throw it at him again.

X X X

The phrase haunted her for the rest of the day, no matter how many baskets she made. It wove itself into the ticks of the clock, in the tap of her shoes on the ground, the airy _bong_ sound of the ball striking concrete. It was the last thing she wanted to think about, but it wouldn't leave her alone.

"Ichiko?"

She looked up, disoriented. Takashi was clinging to the chain link.

"It's getting dark, Ichiko. Aren't you hungry?"

She looked away. "Leave me alone."

"But..."

She dribbled the ball in a circle. He didn't exist. Nobody existed. Just the ball in a circle. That was what it was like when they left you behind.

"Ichiko, please. Your dad worries when you stay out after dark."

She was hungry. Her stomach twisted restlessly, stress and emptiness conflicting. "I can take care of myself."

"We all worry," Takashi persisted.

"Except Yumemi, huh?"

Takashi blinked. "What?"

"Oh, just -- stop bothering me."

He shifted uneasily. "But --"

"Go _away!_"

She heard him sigh and walk away. Her conscience prodded her, but she ignored it. She didn't want to go home. She didn't want to go anywhere.

"Why do you let her treat you you like that?"

Her head snapped up. It was _him._ But he wasn't talking to her.

"W-well..." Takashi tucked a forefinger under his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, fumbling for words. "That's how it's always been, I guess," he said at last. "She's right. She can take care of herself... although..."

The stranger shook his head. "She's never going to respect you if you let her stomp all over you."

Ichiko's jaw dropped. Since when had Takashi become acquainted with Mr. Mystery? A visit to Kazuya's house, more than likely. "Don't talk about me like I'm not here!"

"I want to help her," Takashi said truthfully. "But I don't know what to do."

"Some people don't want to be helped."

"Hey!" Ichiko stomped through the gate. "Why don't you stay out of my business!"

He cocked his head, finally looking at her. "How do you know we were even talking about you?"

There again -- the curve of his cheekbone -- the height of his lean, leggy frame --

She swung, catching him on the jaw. Her fist stung.

His expression didn't change; if the punch had hurt him, it wasn't showing. "Do you feel better now?"

"Augh!" She saw red and swung again. He caught the blow in a palm of iron.

"I-Ichiko-san!" Takashi, shocked, finally roused himself enough to catch her around the waist and drag her backwards. "Please stop!"

"Let me go!" She thrashed, knocking his glasses askew. "I'm not through with him!"

"You're such an idiot!" Takashi clung with surprising strength. "What are you thinking?"

The night shimmered, and she stopped struggling. The stranger was gone.

X X X

She said a few choice words to Takashi and went home. The next morning, he was the first person she ran into on the way to school.

"Morning, Takashi." She'd calmed down after a good night's sleep.

He looked away.

"Takashi!" She waved. "Hey, it's me!"

He hitched his backpack a little higher and walked faster.

Her temper flared and she ran after him, grabbing a strap. "Why is everyone ignoring me?"

Takashi pried the strap out of her hand. "If you want to talk to me, you might start with an apology."

She let go as if slapped. "For what?"

He sighed and rubbed his glasses. There was a bruise on his face. "You don't think anything you did or said last night was out of line?"

"That -- that's --" She floundered. It was rare for Takashi to call her on anything. "Come on, Takashi-kun. Are you still brooding over that?"

"I see." He touched his bruise. "Have a nice day then, Ichiko-san."

He rejoined the stream of students funneling into the school gate. Ichiko, temporarily speechless, watched as a laughing girl and two boys broke from the crowd to welcome him. She'd been so wrapped up in her own concerns that she hadn't noticed he was making other friends.

"Takashi-kun!"

"Morning, Takashi!"

"Can you help me with my homework, Tobe-sempai?"

Ichiko stood there until a good jostling from another student roused her out of her thoughts. She hurried after the crowd and was soon swallowed up in it.

X X X

Takashi didn't come to find her after school. When she got tired of waiting and looked for him, it was to see him disappearing down the street with his new friends.

She felt a sense of loss. Rain or shine, the shy, admiring boy had always been there for her. But her actions last night might have cost her his friendship.

"Takashi! Wait, Takashi-kun!"

Either he was still ignoring her, or they were too far away to hear. They disappeared beyond an overgrown hedge. She hefted her schoolbag and ran after them. "Waaait!"

She hadn't been on top of the volleyball team for nothing. When she cornered the hedge, they were still well within sight. In fact, they were much closer than she'd expected them to be.

They had stopped. They were talking to _him_.

She felt her jaw clench. She couldn't catch more than a word or two, but the cozy little group was clearly exchanging pleasantries. After a few minutes they split up, Takashi and his new friends going one way and Mr. Mystery going another.

Ichiko hesitated, torn. Then her expression firmed and she turned after the nameless man.

_I'm not dogging him. I just want to find out what he's up to._

"That's called dogging people, Ichiko."

Ichiko shook the echo of Yumemi's voice out of her head and concentrated on not being seen. Her target was head and shoulders taller than the rest of the pedestrians, but she looked like all the other nationals around her. She'd have no trouble blending in.

X X X

He led her out of the residential district, to a bus stop, into the commercial district, detoured into another restaurant (she wolfed a cup of ramen from a nearby vendor in the meantime), and finally, two more bus rides later, disembarked in the industrial district.

She was starting to feel uneasy by now. She hadn't told anyone where she'd gone. Her father would assume that she'd stayed at school practicing basketball. Takashi... she shied away from that thought, but he definitely wouldn't be looking for her. Suzume might be concerned, though. If she wasn't too tied up with Kazuya.

Her cell phone, halfway out of her pocket by now, went back in along with her clenched fist. No, she wasn't going to bother texting. Nobody cared where she went anymore.

Meanwhile, he kept walking. Never hurrying, often slowing to admire birds bathing in puddles or stray sunflowers wiggling out of broken concrete, but clearly aiming for somewhere. It was getting harder to keep him in sight; there were fewer people to hide among, and her school outfit was starting to stand out among all the overalls and business suits. She compromised by dropping back just far enough that she could still pick him out of the crowd by height. He was pretty fast, for someone who wasn't hustling.

If she'd formed any expectations as to where he was going, they were shredded as he paused before a damaged set of wrought iron gates. The gates themselves clearly said "No Entrance," but on top of that, they were heavily chained.

She waited. He wanted in; she could see that from the way he looked past the gate. He looked this way and that, taking his time.

"But it's chained shut," she murmured. "What are you going to do about it?"

There was a break in foot traffic, with hardly anyone in sight in either direction. He nodded to himself and cleared the gate fluidly, like a deer leaps a fence -- almost absently, as if it were no effort at all. Then he trotted off down the pathway, moving a little faster now.

Ichiko gaped, then came to her senses and scrambled after him. The chains meant to keep people out only served to help her climb, though she nearly fell off the other side in her haste. She didn't want people yelling at her for trespassing.

She tiptoed down the path after him, peering this way and that among the shrubbery, trying to spot him before he spotted her. A few yards farther on, a rusted sign loomed out of the tangled ivy. She stopped dead. The print was half obscured by yellow HAZARD streamers, but her lips moved as she made it out anyways...

"Fujiyama Chemical," she whispered. And shivered.

X X X

It wasn't long before she found out why the gate was chained shut. She rounded the last clump of overgrown shrubbery and was greeted by a moonscape.

No plants grew from the cracked asphalt and parched earth, but rebar raked the sky in weird, twisted trees of metal. Thousands of miniature lights winked every time she moved; broken glass celebrating the sun. Rainwater pooled in rust-colored puddles, as though the ground were too dense to soak into. Shattered walls leaned this way and that, blocking any hope of a clear view of the place, but every edge of crumbling brick or steel peeping over the top of farther walls hinted at more destruction spread out behind them. What must have been a large industrial complex now resembled a neglected war zone.

And she was alone in it. She crosses her arms across her chest, starting to feel uneasy. Mr. Mystery was annoying, but he was better than no one. Something about this place creeped her out.

"Hello?" she ventured, willing to risk the embarrassment of being found out if it meant she had some company. She stepped forward hesitantly. "Is anyone here?"

Silence. She bit her lip, feeling sweat trickle down her front. There were no trees to break the sun here, and the dry ground threw heat back like a mirror. She unzipped her jacket and pulled it off. It was ironic, really. The only cloud in the sky was...

She shook her head. Useless. It haunted her dreams, but wouldn't give her shade.

"IS ANYONE HERE?" she yelled.

Only her own echoes answered her. She heaved a sigh and kicked a lump of parched earth. It skipped away across the ground, _thunking_ along like a very dry rock. Whatever had happened here, this area where she was standing seemed to have been on the edge of the epicenter. The skeletons of broken buildings loomed off to the left and the right, but directly in front of her the earth had been scrubbed clear, wiped clean in a massive circle. Her team could easily play soccer across it.

"A bomb would leave a crater, wouldn't it?" she mused. Not to mention giving all the news channels a heydey. But there were no craters; there was only flat earth. She walked forward cautiously. The ground was quite firm underfoot, like concrete, though every now and then her footsteps sounded curiously hollow. She walked halfway across the barren circle. Not surprisingly, there were no footprints. She doubted an elephant would leave any track in this place.

There, again; a spot where the earth sounded hollow, only more so. She crouched down and tapped experimentally. In a space of inches, the sound went from heavy _thunks_ to high, reedy _thips_.

She found a rock and pried up a few dry flakes of earth. That was as far as she got; at the next scrape, the caked dirt fell inward, revealing a dark hollow beneath. Cool air wafted up.

She sat back on her heels and stared at the darkness contemplatively. The sun lit a few inches of the sides of the hole, and then the darkness seemed to swallow any illumination. From what she could see, the earth of the sides of the hole looked almost... _melted._

She touched the sides, venturing a hand into the hole. It was a little lumpy, like handblown glass, but the surface was smooth.

_"What the hell do you think you're doing?"_

She barely had time to jump up before something hit her around the waist, yanking her off her feet. The ground blurred, then came to a nauseating stop. When her vision stopped spinning, she was perched on top one of the broken walls.

He was holding her.

"Let go!" she sputtered, shoving free of the arm around her middle, and promptly lost her balance. He caught her by the elbow before she could pitch off the wall.

"Do you have any idea," he said softly, "what is in those burrows?"

She stopped trying to shake him off. "Burrows?" she gulped.

He pointed. She was just in time to see her jacket jerk halfway down the dark hollow. A loud chittering sound erupted, and two writhing centipede-like creatures boiled out of the hole, tussling over the jacket. A third scurried after them.

They _looked_ like centipedes; the biggest difference was that these were seven to nine feet long. She watched them stab and tear her jacket to shreds, feeling sick. _That could have been me._

"Thank you," she managed. The creatures moved with disturbing swiftness; she doubted she could have outrun them. "Thank you for saving me."

"You're welcome." He crouched, assessing the creatures. "Stay here."

He dropped from the wall and approached the animals with the air of someone doing dangerous work. They ignored him until he held out his hand -- and it started to glow.

They snapped round in unison, fascinated. She held her breath as he walked slowly closer. It seemed like a long time, but in reality it was only seconds before he threw up his arm, unleashing a wave of hot blue energy. The centipedes evaporated.

Ichiko swallowed. She'd punched a being who controlled fire.

He returned to the wall with a graceful backwards leap. She grabbed her courage before it too could evaporate.

"I'm sorry I hit you."

He chuckled, but if he thought her timing was suspicious, he didn't mention it. "Apology accepted."

She felt her cheeks heat anyway. "How do they burrow in dirt that hard?" she asked, eager to change the subject.

"They're Akuto mutations; they burrow with Akuto. That's why the sides are glazed."

"Oh." Akuto seemed to make all things possible. "You... you work for _him_, don't you."

He spared her a glance. "I answer to King Munto, yes."

"So." She scooched carefully into a sitting position -- the top of the wall wasn't very wide -- and wrapped her arms around her knees. The resemblance was obvious now, a kind of ethnic echo. "You work for the guy who took my friend away."

He cocked his head at her. She stared back at him, challenging.

He pointed at the sky. "What's that?"

She flinched. "It's... it's..."

The sky darkened; his eyes burned turquoise. A shadow fell over them both, great and triangular, as startling as an eclipse.

"It's an island," she whispered, surrendering. "An island in the sky."

And his hair was the color of a morning sea. He reached for her face and she flinched again, but he only brushed away tears she hadn't realized were there.

"Your friend and my king are very much in love with each other."

That sent a visceral pain shooting through her. It made her angry. "Why her?" she protested. "Aren't there any girls up there? We were happy together. Things were fine until he came!"

"That's not the whole story and you know it."

She turned away, hugging her knees close. That Yumemi had always been alone in some way, she didn't want to be reminded. "And why are you here? Please don't tell me you're in love with Suzume."

He chuckled. "She's cute, but no. I'm here to clean up Gunther's mess."

She processed that and came up blank. "Uh... these?" she hazarded, waving at the burrow.

"Mmm. Munto took care of the original pair, but it seems they'd already reproduced..." He trailed off. "You can imagine what might happen if innocent people wandered in here."

She shuddered. "Or if these got out."

"Precisely." He dropped off the wall but didn't hit the ground, instead hanging a few feet above the hard dirt. "Help me watch for them, will you?" he called.

She didn't understand what he meant until he extended a glowing hand and began playing it back and forth, drifting slowly over the moonscape. "You look like you're fishing."

"I am." He snapped the glow off one hand and shifted it to the other. "Akuto draws them like moths to a flame."

"There!" she yelped, pointing. She'd seen the earth shift a fraction of a second before two creatures burst from the ground, clawing for the delicious energy they'd sensed somewhere above them. He took care of them in quick order and returned to the wall.

"If there are more, it will take them time to dig upward." He passed a hand across his brow.

She risked a glance at the sky. It was a sore topic, but drew her like a blister that refused to be ignored. "He already had a kingdom. That wasn't enough, huh?"

"You don't understand." He shook his head. "The kingdom has _him_. Yumemi is the only thing he really _has_." He sighed. "I shouldn't expect you to understand the difference."

She shot him a resentful look. She didn't appreciate being told that someone else might have been lonely... that someone else might have a claim on Yumemi. "I'm not stupid."

"I never said you were." He pushed off the wall again and began fishing a different area of the moonscape. He was working clockwise, covering ground in a logical order. "Understanding doesn't have much to do with I.Q."

"Look, I _said_ it's an island, didn't I?" The admission chafed, but she made it.

He flashed her a brilliant smile. "I suppose there's hope for you yet."

She was too stunned by his sudden charm to feel properly offended.

"There! There!" She pointed frantically.

He zeroed in on the heaving earth. "On it."

X X X

They zapped bugs for an hour or two more, until Ichiko's stomach growled so loudly that he laughed and called a halt to the hunt.

Ichiko was embarrassed. She'd gotten caught up in it all. It felt good to do something that, well, that _mattered_.

Was this how Yumemi had felt, when she'd gone? ...that her actions finally mattered? That she could make a difference?

He wouldn't let her touch the ground. "We don't know that we got them all." So she had to grit her teeth and let him take her safely across the moonscape, one arm strong around her waist. She looked wistfully at the shreds of her jacket as they passed over. It had been her favorite.

"You mean, that you got them all."

"You helped."

She snorted. "I pointed. Big whoop."

He put her down inside the gate and vanished to check traffic, popping back in in under a minute. "No one's around. I think we can risk it."

And that was how she got her first experience with the craziness that was porting; the world vanishing around her as she vanished from the world, to reappear gasping out on the street.

"Well, it's a good thing nobody's around!" she sputtered, trying to catch her breath. "They'd think I was having a heart attack."

"You're too young for heart attacks."

"A seizure then," she growled. Her stomach growled too.

"Shush, you," she told it.

He smirked. "Where shall we eat?"

It was a long walk back to the commercial district. Ichiko wanted to go to a takoyaki stand, but he turned up his nose. "I don't like that."

She gaped. "You don't like takoyaki?"

"It's all right," he amended. "But the restaurants are better."

She rolled her eyes and pointed. "Is that one good enough for you, your highness?"

"I'm only a general." He assessed her choice with a knowing glance. "And I think it is."

She followed him in. "What, you're not going to the one across the street instead?"

"One, I figured you would try that. So this time, I won't. Reverse psychology and all." He pulled out a chair for her and sat down himself. "Two, I know the restaurant next door. They don't clean the tables very well."

"You've worked this area over, I take it," she murmured.

"So many different recipes! How could I not?" He handed her a menu. "And three, you can order whatever you want, but you're the one who's eating it."

"Is the cuisine that limited where you come from?"

He grimaced. "Some people don't eat at all."

She stared. His statement surprised her so much that she didn't notice the waitress arrive. He wound up ordering for both of them.

"Please tell me they're feeding Yumemi."

"Don't worry. Nothing is too good for her."

Ichiko remembered the wild king's face as he'd cared for Yumemi's injured feet with his own hands. "...I know."

The food arrived; ochazuke for him and fruit salad for her.

"You got me fruit salad?"

"You seemed to like it last time."

"When I'm this hungry, anything's good." She snatched her chopsticks and set about filling the hole in her stomach.

X X X

"Hello."

"Hello."

Ichiko shuffled her feet. They hadn't exactly agreed to meet at the chained gate the next day, but he hadn't told her not to come either. Nor did he look surprised to see her.

"You didn't climb the gate."

She rubbed the back of her neck. "I'm not real anxious to be centipede bait."

"That's wise of you." He pointed. "What's that?"

She hefted the small cooler. "Food."

"Ah. I had the same idea." He tapped a satchel.

"You don't trust my cooking," she groused.

"You're cooking's quite good, so I hear." He patted the satchel. "Though mine's not bad either. It's you I don't trust."

"Thanks so much." She blew out an annoyed breath. He was right; she hadn't been able to resist spiking a couple of the rice balls with cayenne pepper. "Can we get started?"

He offered a hand. "Of course."

She hesitated. She wasn't wild about either teleporting or touching him. But both were less potential embarrassment than being caught scrambling over the gate.

It still turned her stomach upside down, though. When the spinning stopped and her school lunch was no longer in danger of escaping, she straightened up carefully. He'd elected to port directly onto a wall.

"You'd better sit down."

She complied mutely. It was a long way to the ground. Only when she had her ankles snugly wrapped around a loop of rebar did he let go of her arm.

"Is there any chance that they've spread outside the company grounds?"

"They haven't," he said immediately. "That was the first thing I checked."

She wondered how he could tell. Had he gone Akuto fishing on the sidewalks? Surely not.

He read her expression. "They would have been attracted to the pedestrian traffic right away. Footsteps, tapping, that sort of thing."

He winked; she blushed.

"But they haven't yet left the nesting grounds, because the earth here is Akuto-enriched. Gunther's work." His lip twitched. "Munto's little fireworks display helped with that too, I imagine."

"You know a lot about this."

He shrugged, not wanting to discuss unpleasant details. Yumemi still had nightmares about all that. "It's complicated. You spotting again?"

"I can't very well fry them."

He patted her head. "True enough."

She batted his hand away. "Shut up and fish."

He laughed.

X X X

They fried half a dozen more centipedes, at intervals of twenty minutes to half an hour. The creatures tended to surface in clusters. Ichiko shuddered to imagine them coiled up together, a seething ball of scaly hunger somewhere deep within the earth.

"I apologized to Takashi," she said, somewhere between the fourth and fifth centipede. He'd come back to the wall to rest and (she suspected) see how she was holding up.

"I'm glad to hear that." He spread a hand to keep the sun out of his eyes. It was getting hot. "He's a nice boy."

She traced a random kanji in the blackened soot coating parts of the wall. Grey lines converged and she found that she had written "woman." She smeared that out and wrote "king" next; annoyed, she rubbed it off and finished up with "fish." "Are we done?"

"I thought we'd break for a snack."

"Here?" She looked around in dismay. If she dropped her chopsticks from this height, she'd be eating with her fingers. Even if he was knight enough to retrieve them, they'd probably be tainted with centipede droppings. Not to mention the heat here.

"No, no." He took her arm. "I'll show you."

She barely had time to flinch before the air wavered; shortly thereafter, she found herself standing in a cool, shady little atrium. She could sense concrete walls somewhere, but they were mostly hidden by the trees.

"Pick a spot." He waved. "I'll go get the food."

They had left the cooler and satchel under a shrub, away from the hard-baked centipede nest. After he vanished, she took a few steps forward. The landscaping here had obviously gone wild some time ago, but the rains had kept it green. A few tables with chairs stood around a central fountain, inviting workers no longer there to sit and watch the water. The tables were wrought iron, worked into lacy grapevine patterns. A few spots were starting to rust.

She dipped a hand into the water. The pipes had stopped working, but rainwater had been enough to keep some water hyacinth going. Coins winked between the green, succulent leaves.

He reappeared. "You pick a table?"

She waved at the one closest to the fountain. "That one's good."

He put the satchel down and handed her the cooler. She ran a finger across the table -- no dust, thanks again to the rains -- and started unpacking her lunch. When she turned around, the fountain was working.

She blinked. "How did you do that?"

"Me?"

"'Me,' nothing. Your hands are wet." And half his sleeves, too.

He looked at her innocently. "The battery was dead, that was all."

"Heh. What are you, a walking power plant?"

"That would be your friend Yumemi."

Ichiko rubbed her temples. That part had never made sense to her. "Whatever."

She was halfway through her first riceball before the cayenne kicked in. She froze, then calmly picked up her thermos. There was no way in hell she was letting him know that she'd fallen into her own trap.

X X X

After more two hours of fishing with nothing to show for it, he declared the area pest free. "There's no way they could resist that much Akuto for so long."

"You're sure?"

"I'll check again tomorrow. But I'm sure."

Tomorrow. She looked at the sky, then averted her gaze. One way or another, it seemed bent on depriving her. "Then you'll be on your way, I guess."

He held out a hand. "You never know."

She yielded an arm willingly enough, and they drifted down from the wall to retrieve the lunch things. "I'm hungry again," he declared. "Let's get out of here and stop somewhere."

"My treat?" she offered.

He cocked an eyebrow. "What's the catch?"

She wavered, then lifted her chin. "Your name. Tell me your name."

He waved her offer away. "You can have that for the asking."

He picked up the satchel and cooler, took her elbow and ported them out the gate. Then he started walking -- long, unhurried strides that ate up distance like a runner's.

She ran after him. "So what is it?"

He smiled back at her, and his eyes were the color of a corel sea. "Rui," he said. "My name is Rui."

**-The End**

DISCLAIMER: Say it with me: this story not created, acknowledged or endorsed by Kyoto Animation or Yoshiji Kigami, to whom all relevant characters and trademarks belong. No infringement is intended and absolutely no profit was or ever will be made. **_Number the Clouds_** itself is fan domain and may be freely recopied and archived. Reader reactions are appreciated, as always.

Thanks to **Shadowshock** for proofreading.


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